A Comprehensive Overview of Language Teaching Methods
Language Teaching Methods: A Comprehensive Overview
Traditional Approaches
The Grammar-Translation Method
For a long time, the grammar-translation method was considered the only way to teach languages. This method, borrowed from the teaching of classical languages, focused on grammatical rules and vocabulary lists translated into the students’ native language. Students memorized paradigms and translated sentences, often disconnected from their daily lives. While this method is less popular today due to its limitations in developing oral communication skills, some of its techniques are still used.
The Direct Method
The direct method emerged as a response to the shortcomings of the grammar-translation method. It emphasizes oral skills and immersion in the target language. Reading and writing are developed after listening and speaking. While this method promotes communication, it requires native or near-native speakers as teachers, which can be a limitation.
Behaviorist and Communicative Approaches
The Audio-Lingual Method
Rooted in behaviorism, the audio-lingual method uses drills to form language habits. Students are rewarded for correct responses, reinforcing memorization and pattern recognition. However, this method often lacks contextualization and doesn’t allow for natural error correction, which is crucial for language acquisition.
Community Language Learning
In community language learning, the teacher acts as a counselor, facilitating communication and providing support. Students choose topics and communicate in the target language, with the teacher translating and correcting as needed. This method encourages student autonomy and reflection on the learning process.
Innovative and Experiential Methods
The Silent Way
Developed by Caleb Gattegno, the Silent Way minimizes teacher talk and encourages student discovery. The teacher uses gestures and visual aids to guide students, fostering independent learning and problem-solving skills.
Suggestopedia
Devised by Georgi Lozanov, Suggestopedia emphasizes a relaxed and comfortable learning environment. Music, visualization, and positive suggestion are used to lower the affective filter and enhance learning.
Total Physical Response (TPR)
Created by James Asher, TPR connects language learning with physical movement. Students respond to commands and later give commands themselves, mimicking the way children acquire their first language. This method is particularly effective for young learners and kinesthetic learners.
Practical Application: An Example with Art
Using artwork, such as Arcimboldo’s paintings, can be a creative way to integrate language skills. Students can describe the pictures, focusing on vocabulary related to fruits, vegetables, and facial features. This activity can be adapted for different levels and incorporates listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills.
Integrating Language Skills
Listening
Listening activities should be engaging and purposeful. Using a story, for example, allows for pre-listening activities (vocabulary introduction, prediction), while-listening activities (matching pictures to words), and post-listening activities (answering comprehension questions). This approach helps develop listening comprehension, vocabulary, and memory skills.
Speaking
Role-playing activities, such as a customer-shopkeeper interaction, provide opportunities for practicing intonation, stress, and nonverbal communication. Feedback should be provided strategically, focusing on fluency and communication rather than immediate error correction.
Reading
Reading comprehension can be enhanced through pre-reading activities (predicting, activating prior knowledge) and post-reading activities (comprehension questions, summarizing). Choosing texts that are relevant and engaging is crucial for motivating students.
Conclusion
This overview highlights the diversity of language teaching methods, each with its own strengths and limitations. Choosing the most effective method depends on the learners’ needs, the learning context, and the teacher’s preferences. By understanding the principles behind each method, teachers can create a dynamic and engaging learning environment that fosters language acquisition and communication skills.
Arcimboldo`s: 
Children write a description of their pictures, give them the model: I choose fruit, vegetable for part of the face, I will read aloud some descriptions and encourage the children to match the descriptions with the pictures. I can also give each child one of the descriptions and they have to find out the picture it is describing.
Writing
Listening
The activity that I have chosen is that they will hear at class a story and they will have to complete a table. The story is going to be read by the teacher. But before doing it I will do predicting and guess meaning from context, because as we know both of them are listening strategies. First of all we will tell them what the listening is going to be about. It is important to point out that children will not be able to deal with very long listening activities. Also I will do it in a clear way with frequent repetitions. I will include the three stages, pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. In the pre-listening I will introduce vocabulary and some structures, while-listening: they will match pictures with words and in the post-listening they will answer questions in this case it will be a table. The purpose of this activity is to improve some linguistic aspects, such as intonation, vocabulary and tenses, and to improve concentration span and memory. It is very important that in listening activities should always be provided by the teacher, it is important that teachers improvise speech in the classroom, as we have seen in real life situations there is interaction between the speaker and the listener.
Speaking
Information gap, choice and feedback
They will do a role play about a customer and a shopkeeper the advantages of the role play are: intonation, stress, facial expressions, language is practiced in a particular situation, communication is encouraged. During this activity we should not correct their mistakes immediately, instead we will write down what we think should be corrected and will do it later. However if they ask if something is correct we should answer. In this activity feedback has two important aspects: assessment and correction. In assessment the learner receives information about the quality of the performance, and with the correction the learner’s performance is more precise, the teacher can suggest better alternatives to something that has been produced by the learner or even elicit those alternatives from the learner themselves. The feedback that we can give during the activity as I said is to reformulate the learner’s sentence correctly without interrupting. And after the activity write some of the mistakes on the board and encourage learners to correct them, or ask learners to choose the correct one or giving written notes to each learner with the individual mistakes and suggestions.
Reading
As we know there are some reading skills that are reading for general understanding, for specific information (scanning), interpreting and inferring, deducing meaning from context and reading for detailed information. I will give them a text of a story and first of all I will present the vocabulary before reading the text, they will do pre-reading activities and questions, and comprehension questions after reading the text. In the pre-reading learners will read some sentences that are related to the text and they have to say if they are true or false, or instead of it the learners will be given a topic and they list the things they know and do not know about it. After reading in the part of comprehension they can choose a picture that is related to the meaning of the text. These tasks will help them to understand the text and will make the reading purposeful.